I'm an Aussie presently living in London. This blog normally consists of my random thoughts on a variety of subjects, ranging from politics to telecommunications technology, movies cricket, urban design, beer, cheese, and whatever else comes into my head.

Friday, March 04, 2005

Off for the weekend

I am going to southern France for the weekend. The plan is to fly into Toulouse tomorrow morning and back out of Toulouse on Sunday evening, and to drive to Millau to look at the now complete viaduct at some point of the weekend. And I might drive around some of the scenic country nearby, eat some food, and generally enjoy myself.

I probably won't spend that long in Toulouse itself. However, I do know that Toulouse is famous for being the source of Toulouse sausages (to which long term readers of this plog know that I am partial) and of many Airbus aircraft (I am less partial to the company, but there is nothing wrong with their engineering). In the true spirit of European backstabbing, there is a second Airbus factory in Hamburg. I don't think I have any urge to visit the Airbus factory (although I did once visit the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington, just outside Seattle), however, there might be something to be said for eating some Toulouse sausages while actually in Toulouse. Has anyone a suggestion as to a good place for me to get some particularly fine examples?

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

People continue to follow me to northern Spain.

I have told the story of my trip to Spain last August, and how the fact that there were no discount airlines flying to anywhere along the coast of Spain and Portgual between Bilbao and Faro was a major factor leading in my having to make an absurd overland journey from Porto to Bilbao, but was also a major factor responsible for their being few Anglophone tourists in that part of Europe, even in high summer.

I have also observed that since then Ryanair have announced flights from London to Santander, Santiago de Compostela, and Porto, meaning that the places I visited will be much more accessible this year.

Subsequent to that, I now see that Easyjet have added a flight from London to Oviedo in the Asturias. (This part of Spain has a twin city structure. The cities of Oviedo and Gijon are very close together, with Gijon (where I spent a night) being on the coast and Oviedo being a few kilometres inland. Although they are not contiguous they are close enough together that by many measures they would make up a single agglomeration just the same).

What does this mean? Well, the last gap in my journey has been filled. Whereas last August quite a lot of travel was necessary to get to some of the places I visited, it is now possible to get to pretty much anywhere on the trip inexpensively out of London in a couple of hours.

The mood of these places is going to change. Of course I will be one of the people using these flights, as I enjoyed myself a great deal last year and want to go back to some of those areas. In particular, I want to drive up the Douro valley from Porto to the vineyards where the grapes for port wine are grown, and I want to see more of the estuaries of the Galician coast.

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

I remember when 16k was a lot of memory

If an old computer is running slowly, the easiest way to do something about it is almost always to install more RAM. New software amd new operating systems use more memory than old ones. If there is not enough RAM, then a lot of the data has to be stored on the hard disk instead of in RAM, data has to be constantly swapped back and forwards, and everything goes slower. (As a bonus, all the hard disk activity means that there is more danger of the disk failing, and if you are using a laptop this all runs down your battery faster). Many a computer has been thrown away as slow and out of date and replaced by a new one when a RAM upgrade would speed it up considerably and make it useable for some time longer. (Non technical people often fail to grasp the distinction between storage and memory, so this point is sometimes difficult to explain).

In any event, Windows XP is known as a bit of a memory hog, and for this reason I won't build a computer with less than 512Mb of RAM, because performance with less than this is generally poor. (XP is not alone on this score - you need 512Mb for decent performance on Mac OS X, too). If someone is buying a computer from an OEM, I strongly recommend either that they buy it with 512Mb or they get me to upgrade the RAM immediately after they buy it. (The second option is usually more cost effective, as OEMs seriously overcharge for memory upgrades). I make it very clear that I think that sticking with 256Mb is asking for trouble. (The situation is even worse if the computer has integrated graphics and the main memory is being used to drive the display as well as run programs, which is often the case on cheap computers).

I have generally argued that 512Mb is enough for good performance, however. If someone who is not financially constrained wants a computer, then 1Gb is worth buying, but to some extent this is insurance against future requirements. When I built myself a new desktop computer a few months back, I put 1Gb in, but to some extent I considered this overkill.

However, recently I found myself doing one of those memory upgrades for a friend with a new laptop. The laptop had come with a woefully inadequate 256Mb and I offered to upgrade it to 512Mb. For this I needed a 256Mb SO-DIMM. As it happened, my own laptop had 512Mb in it, in the form of two 256Mb SODIMMs of the correct type. Rather than buying a 256Mb SO-DIMM, I instead bough a 512Mb SO-DIMM for myself, swapped this with one of the 256Mb SO-DIMMs in my laptop, and then installed that 256Mb SO-DIMM in my friend's computer. This brought the memory in my laptop up to 768Mb.

And what did I find out? I wasn't expecting that much improvement, particularly given that the laptop has separate graphics RAM and main memory is not being shared by the graphics system. But I was badly wrong. As it happened the performance of my machine improved considerably. It is running substantially faster and there is less swapping to disk. I don't know to what extent battery life has improved, but I am sure that it must have. The truth is clearly that more than 512Mb is a good idea even now. I will have to change my recommendations.

But a 768Mb or 1Gb seems like such a gigantic amount of memory. I am not going to claim that 640k should be enough for everyone or anything like that but seriously, what is the computer doing with all that memory?